In the news last year the Gentoo project was in a bit of trouble with not filing tax returns. Now just yesterday, I saw that Gentoo released 2008.0 Beta 1.

Here is the summary from Distrowatch.com:

The first development build of Gentoo Linux 2008.0 is out and ready for testing: “When we said ‘soon,’ even we didn’t realize how soon it would be. 2008.0_beta1 is here. Your support and enthusiasm are greatly appreciated – thank you. You can help make 2008.0 amazing! Test out this beta and report any functionality issues you encounter. Since this is the first beta, we’re looking only for bugs in functionality, not bugs in appearance such as desktop backgrounds or other artwork. We expect to release a second beta once your testing has helped us fix problems with this first beta. A migration to RPM was carefully considered again for this release, but in the end we decided to wait for the few remaining RPM-using distributions to migrate to the superior packaging format of ebuilds.“

To read release announcement.

To Download the live CDs from here: livecd-i686-installer-2008.0_beta1.iso which is 655MB, livecd-amd64-installer-2008.0_beta1.iso which is 701MB.

I may try this out later in virtualbox which I use on Ubuntu Hardy Heron.